Different types of moveable barrier operators have been sold over the years and these barrier operator systems have been used to actuate various types of moveable barriers. For example, garage door operators have been used to move garage doors and gate operators have been used to open and close gates.
Such barrier movement operators may include various mechanisms to open and close the barrier. For instance, a wall control unit may be coupled to the barrier movement operator and send signals to a head unit thereby causing the head unit to open and close the barrier. In addition, operators often include a receiver unit at the head unit to receive wireless transmissions from a hand-held code transmitter or from a keypad transmitter, which may be affixed to the outside of the area closed by the barrier or other structure.
In previous barrier operator systems, a transmitter was often used to actuate a barrier operator and thereby move the barrier. In some previous systems, the actuation of the transmitter also caused a light attached to the barrier operator to be activated. In other previous systems, the transmitter was used to initiate a procedure that set the force and limit settings of the barrier operator. Still other barrier operator systems allowed the transmitter to enable pet opening functions and delay-to-close functions associated with the barrier.
However, not all features of previous barrier operator systems were permitted to be enabled or adjusted by simply having a user actuate a transmitter. For instance, customers were typically required to first pay for the additional features or adjustments they desired and this usually necessitated that a trained installer manually install the features at the barrier operator. In this regard, installers sometimes needed to use special tools or follow complicated procedures in order to install new features or adjust the parameters of the barrier operator.
The requirement that an installer must make the changes or upgrades to the barrier operator resulted in several problems with these previous systems. For instance, a special interface for making these changes was often required to be installed/used at the barrier operator thereby increasing system costs. Because the procedures to make the changes were often complex, installing and/or changing the features frequently proved to be a time-consuming process resulting in delays in making the adjustments. Furthermore, the end user was frequently inconvenienced during the installation process since every time they desired a new feature be enabled or changed, they had to first schedule an appointment with an installer and then wait for the installer to come to the location of the barrier operator to actually perform the upgrade.